I was a participant in ScoreSpace #17, which just released its results. I know that games receive a score penalty if they have fewer than the median number of ratings, so during the rating period, I had been checking both the number of ratings my game had and the number of ratings the median game had (when sorted by "Most Rated"), and trying to share my game with as many community members as I could to ensure my game did not fall below the median. By the end of the rating period, I thought I had just managed to avoid the penalty, as both my game and the median game had 14 ratings.
When I checked the results, I was surprised to see that I ended up receiving a pretty hefty ratings penalty that bumped me down from 3rd place overall (by raw score) to 21st place (by adjusted score). I was especially surprised because, while I had worked out the median to be 14 ratings, the results page stated that the median was 12 ratings, meaning my position was safer than I thought.
However, when checking the results in the individual categories, I noticed a discrepancy: while the Overall results said I had 14 ratings as I expected, the results for all the individual categories (Gameplay, Theme, Aesthetics, and Sound) said I only had 9 ratings (see attached image). I checked to see if this was the case for the other entries in this jam, and it was: all the other games I checked were listed as having slightly fewer ratings in the individual categories than in the Overall results. I copied all these smaller numbers into a spreadsheet to find the median, and sure enough, it was 12, not 14.
It seems that, for all games in a jam, the number of ratings that a game receives is actually two different numbers. The larger number is displayed on the game's rating page and the Overall results, as well as being used for the "Most Rated" sort. The smaller number is displayed on all the individual category results, as well as being used to calculate the median and adjusted scores. I'm guessing that this discrepancy is a bug, since you are required to rate a game in all categories before you submit, so it's impossible to have fewer ratings in one category than you do overall. Besides, I doubt this has anything to do with there being fewer ratings in one category than overall, since for all the games I checked, the game was listed as having the same exact number of ratings in all four categories - an unlikely coincidence if some voters were leaving some categories blank. If it isn't a bug, why are there two different numbers?
